NOTatISTE Portrait Challenge
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference is happening June 22-16, 2024 in Denver, Colorado. There’s a great community of educators who are not at the conference who connect online. They gather around the hashtag #NOTatISTE on various social media sites. They share resources, create things like name tags, and join live events. Of course, all are welcome to join in on the #NOTatISTE shenanigans.
To contribute to the NOTatISTE fun, I’ve made a template for anyone to use to create a portrait in Google Slides. The challenge is you cannot use any images—the portrait must be made entirely of shapes. Don’t worry, there is a tutorial video in the left margin of the template. The document also has color codes for hair colors and skin tones
While A.I. generated avatars are the latest craze, there’s value in human-crafted digital art. I use my portrait like many teachers use Bitmojis. I love that I can move around the shapes to give my portrait different expressions. I can easily the change the shirt and background colors, and I can add speech bubbles.
I’d love to see your creation! Post to the NOTatISTE Portrait Challenge padlet by Friday, June 28 to be entered into a random drawing for a Shapegrams membership.
Shapegrams are a series of digital art lessons available in Google Slides and Google Drawings. The Portrait Lesson is at the Progressing Purple level, so it’s a bit challenging if you don’t have much experience in Google Slides or Drawings.
If you enjoy drawing your portrait, you can learn to build a body for it (using shapes, of course) in the Posable Person Lesson. In the video I demonstrate how to arrange shapes so that you can pose your character in a variety of ways.
There are free Shapegrams that teachers can use immediately with students. And if you and your students like them, there are many more where those came from. Membership is just $35 a year per teacher. Members have a license to distribute Shapegrams documents to their students.
Smiles from Iowa,
Tony Vincent
Jill Lamer lead a project where students from multiple 4th grade classes collaborated on a “Famous Faces” podcast. Each featured person is drawn with shapes! You’ve got to see the drawings and take a listen to the audio recordings!
Sharon Sinclair’s second grade class in Montana is known as the 2D Nerds. They drew self-portraits and then focused on changing their characters’ expressions. See their masterpieces in this blog post.
